Lecture - Dr Marie-Paule Kieny - Lessons learned from Ebola R&D during a public health emergency

When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa erupted in the spring of 2014, the global health community was ill prepared to cope. There were no vaccines, no treatments, few diagnostics, and insufficient medical teams and trained
responders. In spite of this lack of R&D preparedness, the Ebola experience
demonstrates that, it is possible to compress R&D timelines from a decade or longer, to less than a single year. This is mostly to be credited to an unprecedented collaborative effort building on the availability of a small number of candidate diagnostic tests, drugs and vaccines that could rapidly move into clinical phase evaluation. A series of international consultations and activities – including the organization of a successful Ebola vaccine efficacy trial in Guinea - were led by WHO as a contribution to the unprecedented global efforts to control the Ebola epidemic. Since September 2015, WHO expert teams, an international scientific advisory board, and partners engaged through global forums are collaborating to articulate a novel R&D model for emerging pathogens likely to cause severe outbreaks in the near future, and for which few or no medical countermeasures exist: the WHO R&D Blueprint. Already, several consultations have been held among national governments and public health agencies, researchers, social scientists and industry. They have selected priority pathogens on which immediate action is warranted, evaluated several promising platform technologies, identified major bottlenecks to international collaboration, agreed upon basic data sharing principles, and explored innovative approaches to conducting clinical trials. New developments on the R&D Blueprint will be presented.

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